Understanding 2: Multiple Points of Entry

Understanding implies a flexibility in the ways that we are able to use or apply a skill or concept. To explain something, in a form exactly as taught, like a tape recording, is not understanding. Practicing a skill by approaching it in multiple and varied ways over an extended period is necessary. Understanding is demonstrated through performance. You understand it because you can do it.

In class, we spent a week exploring the nature of understanding, through discussion, exercises, and observation. Students were then assigned to respond to four questions in writing. See understanding. The kids responses suggested that, in too many cases, the ideas remained abstract and on the surface. Some wrote that we understood something if we were able to explain it. Others said that we could assess understanding by giving a quiz or test.

Given the exercises that they had engaged in earlier in the week (the battery and bulb problem, the hole-in-the-Earth problem, and the seasons' problem), the use of the terms explain and quiz might be accurate. I wanted to capture their thinking/reasoning, and asked them to discuss and explain their ideas. They perceived that they were being quizzed. It was, however, very important that students see that a new pilot must be required to do more than pass a written test to demonstrate their competence to fly.

I opted to hover around the concept of understanding for another week, and approach it from several new angles, broadening the points of entry. (Note the following on-line references re entry points: Wiske; Wiley, see page 35; Perrone.) My students would act as if they were local experts on the topic, and enter other classrooms to share their learning. We would then spend the week preparing resources -- a poster and a video -- focusing on four aspects of understanding: what is it, how do we know when we have it, how do we get it, and how do we teach it?

While still in production, the video program, conceived in the style of Bill Nye, is important, as individual students discuss and demonstrate what it is that they understand -- skateboarding, basketball, reading, tying shoes, riding a bicycle. The film personalizes understanding in a way that is both fun and instructive.

In addition, students were daily shown video clips of people engaged in a particular activities (bicycle riding, juggling, gymnastics) and asked to assess each performer's understanding: Did they demonstrate understanding? How might they have acquired that understanding? Explain with multiple specific examples.

The kids' writing was consistently strong -- insightful and well-detailed. The notion that a person demonstrates their understanding through explanation was dropped, replaced with attention to the automaticity of sub-skills, and understanding as demonstrated through performance.

This is a BIG issue: Many of us talk about understanding, we use the term freely, as if by knowing about it we understand it. Not so. Teaching for understanding, and assessing for it, capturing student thinking, is slippery and subtle. What we get depends upon the nature of our questions, as we determine how far and in what directions understanding extends, where invention and conjecture begin to substitute for real understanding.

What do we do when our students do not understand what we teach? How do we respond? What if they are not interested or invested?

The immediate answer seems to be this: ensure that the entry points into a set of ideas are multiple and varied; aim for an internal representation that is multi-intellectual, formed from rich experience, as much as we are able to provide, given our resources.

Whether we're teaching the concept of gravity, riding a bicycle, or the nature of understanding, we begin by attending to basics, then those basics are applied in a broad, rich context. I believe what I lacked, in my initial plan, was this last piece. Then we must move on, continuing to apply the ideas in new contexts -- a study of science and history, water, geology, paleoanthropology, and early civilizations.